Pep Cruz: "Why should I go to Madrid, the adversary that has screwed us for 500 years?"

GironaThe brief curriculum he has written, of little more than four lines, does not do justice to his professional career in the performing arts world, which is immense, not only for the large number of roles he has played, but also for the quality of the plays in which he has acted and for the excellence with which he has interpreted each of the characters. "Pep Cruz is theatre made man," critics have said of him. "An actor who does everything well," has also been written about him. "The most popular and beloved of the actors in the Catalan theatrical Olympus," others have added. Born in Girona in 1948 and forged as an actor in this city, Pep Cruz has worked, as a performer, as a director, or as a screenwriter in almost a hundred plays, including Cyrano de Bergerac, King Lear, Forido Pensil or Infantillajes; he has acted in 8 musicals, including the successful Mar i Cel; in 8 television series, such as Ventdelplà and Oh! Europa, and in more than thirty films.

Despite being one of the Catalan actors who has worked the most and the best, Pep Cruz has been one of the least awarded, but that does not keep him awake at night. "For me, the great reward for an actor is filling theaters. I work for the people, not to win awards, which are only to satisfy the actor's ego," he assures.

It is also a reward for him to have succeeded without having to leave Catalonia: "If I am Catalan and I can do my work in Catalonia, why do I have to go to Madrid, to the adversary's home, which has screwed us over for 500 years? To be more famous? To win awards? I have always been very clear about that."

At 78 years old, Pep Cruz is still in great shape and works without a break, as he always has, and maintains the same eagerness to surpass himself in each performance as on the first day he stepped onto a stage. "I haven't pursued a professional career, because I don't like to run. What I have done is be an instrument, and I am still doing it. This means preparing myself physically and intellectually to perform, not stopping studying theatre, perfecting my voice and breathing, reading a lot, going to see plays, and, above all, doing a lot of theatre, because theatre is learned."

He began to learn at a very young age in his city, Girona, where he founded the TEI de Sant Marçal company, along with Andreu Caamaño, Maite Martí, and Pep, Quico and Mariona Estivill, among others.

They were years of late Francoism and, with provocative, innovative and socially critical theater, the company filled theaters wherever it performed despite the constant threat of censorship, which often applied the implacable scissor or prohibition. "We already used body expression methods that we learned from books I used to buy in Montpellier or Perpignan when these techniques were not yet spoken of here," recalls Pep Cruz. The actor was also the driving force behind the Association of Theater of the Gerona Counties, which brought theater to numerous institutes and vocational training centers in towns and cities of the demarcation, and of the multitudinous puppet shows that the company Títeres de Sant Marçal programmed for the Girona Fairs.

Engineer at Chupa-Chups

Trained as an engineer, Pep Cruz combined his passion for theater for a few years with his work at the Chupa-Chups company in Barcelona, on Carrer de París, where he was director of exports. “When I finished work at Chupa-Chups, I took a train to Girona, where they would pick me up by car at the station to go to the TEI company headquarters in Sant Marçal to rehearse until one in the morning. They knew me and had the thoughtfulness not to wake me up. Until my son Marçal was born, then I said that had to end and I decided to dedicate myself exclusively to theater in Girona,” he explains.

The leap to Barcelona with Flotats

A call from Josep Maria Flotats to offer him a screen test for the role of Ragueneau in the play Cyrano de Bergerac at the Poliorama Theatre in Barcelona represented a leap in Pep Cruz's professional career and a change of residence. "It was said and done: two days later, Flotats called me to tell me the role was mine," recounts Cruz. He was 36 years old and from then on lived in the Catalan capital with his current partner, the actress Anna Rosa Cisquella.

His heart, however, remains in Girona, where he keeps his parents' house, although he has it rented out, and where he often goes to visit his brothers. He owes Girona, he says, his "theatrical, cultural, and intellectual training," as well as his rebellious spirit, largely fueled in the bar L'Arc, an establishment whose owner, Lluís Bonaventura, devised the slogan: "We have a cathedral in the courtyard," as it is located right in front of the cathedral's staircase. In times of dictatorship, L'Arc was a meeting place for intellectuals and was like Pep Cruz's second home. "There you would find people as daring as the journalists who created the magazine Presencia at those difficult times, and at five in the morning Lluís could make you some sardines that he himself had gone to buy in some seaside town," he recalls.

Cruz proudly claims to have contributed to creating the footprint that can be seen on the railing on the right side of the stone cathedral staircase, above as if it were a slide. "I went to high school in the old Capuchin convent and the cathedral stairs were our playground," says the actor. his cousin to buy "a peseta of olives." when we were little, they told us that the engineer of the Eiffel Tower himself had done it, and that fascinated us," says Cruz, who nostalgically recalls another, much smaller and more modest bridge, which was washed away by a downpour and which he and his parents used to go to the Girona FC stadium on match days.